She is at the Toronto International Film Festival publicising a campy murder-mystery-musical trifle called 8 Femmes, which opened in Australia on Boxing Day. In it she stars alongside such other French icons as Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant and Danielle Darrieux.

Deneuve is candid and warm, in contrast to the icy screen image that has long haunted her.

"Maybe on screen I give this impression of being cold, or at least cool. But that is not me, that is the characters," she says. "It's very strange how despite everything you've done, people need to put you in a category. It's convenient [for them]." ");document.write("

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With more than 75 films to her credit, Deneuve has played a range of roles. There's the vampire of The Hunger (1983), the rootless woman returning to her native land in Indochine (1992) and the hard-as-diamond widow of a jeweller who gets caught in a web of intrigue in Place Vendome (1998).

But the films she is most associated with are where she plays aloof objects of desire, such as Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) or Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour (1967) and Tristana (1970).

She is thankful for the career she has had, but yearns for the challenge of playing a character unlike any she has done. So when director Francois Ozon (Under the Sand) wooed her for an Agatha Christie-ish whodunit in which each of the principals gets a solo singing spot, Deneuve did not think long before agreeing to the daft notion.

"I did so because it was new territory, it was dangerous enough," says Deneuve. "When you've been involved in one kind of role for so long and you're recognised, you know, the tendency is to do the roles that fit the impression that people have of you, which is always a little more conventional than the reality."

Unlike so many American stars, who cling to one specific persona, Deneuve has long felt free to diverge from her image. "It's not that I don't care, but I care more for what I want to do and how I feel about it, rather than [what] the audience [wants]," she says bluntly. "Because in Europe, we don't have like in America, the terrible challenge of the box office results."

Ozon, who initially contemplated doing a remake of Clare Boothe Luce's The Women, says it was important to gather a cast of France's most luminous film actresses. "Because it's funnier to see stars in struggles than actresses that nobody knows," he reasons. "I had the idea of Catherine Deneuve right away, because she is the most famous French actress.

"For me, it was like a dream cast. I didn't think the eight would accept," he says, still a little startled by his good fortune and the challenge he gave himself. "When they did, that was like a nightmare. I said, 'How will I manage these eight women?"'

Not all of them took easily to the rigours of singing and dancing, but Deneuve had no qualms. "Because I did that a little with Bjork in the Lars von Trier film," she says, referring to 2000's Dancer in the Dark, in which she improbably, and unconvincingly, played a frumpy factory worker.

"And even if I was dubbed when I did Umbrellas of Cherbourg," the 1964 Jacques Demy musical in which Deneuve starred opposite her older sister, Francoise Dorleac, "I had experience singing and playing at the same time, even though it was not my voice."

Over the years Deneuve has flirted with Hollywood, making such indifferent studio films as the 1969 romantic comedy The April Fools opposite Jack Lemmon, the 1975 Burt Reynolds action flick Hustle, in which she played a callgirl, and last year's The Musketeer, as Queen Anne. But she dismisses the suggestion that she could have been a bigger star in American films.

"Frankly, I didn't have the occasion," she shrugs. "I haven't been offered things that were interesting enough for me to stay there. I said, 'I'm not going to come to America to do a part I would refuse to do in French.' My desire to do a film in English is not that big to accept just anything."

And yes, she readily agrees, there is simply more work for her in France, now that she is, uh, of a certain age. "I don't think there is room for an actress of my age over here," Deneuve says matter-of-factly. "I talk to actresses over here and so often they say, 'How lucky you are to live in Europe."'

It is not just the roles she continues to be offered, but a codified French attitude towards fame that makes her life in her native land more civilised. "There is more privacy in Europe, and especially in France, where a private life is more strongly protected. And protected legally. You cannot talk to or take a picture of someone without their agreement, or publish it without their being able to sue you."

And - get this - Deneuve does not think of herself as a celebrity. "Yes, because we are not stars really in France," she insists. "We can be stars one night, like Cinderella, but we don't live like stars. We don't have that kind of life. We don't have the same kind of films, we don't have the same budgets for film, we don't live in big houses with bodyguards. It's very different."

It is hard to fathom, and maybe even a little disappointing, but Deneuve says she can walk down a street in France, she can go shopping in a boulangerie without causing riots in the aisles. Her life, she says, is surprisingly normal. She stays grounded.

"I suppose by working and having a busy life with my family, my children, relatives. I suppose it's the way I've been brought up - I was taught to dream, but with both feet on the ground."

8 Femmes is now showing at the Cremorne Orpheum, Verona, Dendy and Cinema Paris.